By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Dateline southern California…the fuel that powers the Hollywood machine is still on strike. The writer’s guild ain’t writing and new production for film and television is at a standstill. Even the strike by Broadway stagehands is over, but there is still no deal for the screenwriters.

This is a story I have been very casually following for the last few weeks. That, of course, was until a couple of days ago when my flight touched down in southern California. In the few days I’ve been out here, auditioning some of my material to the producers of shows like “Days of Our Lives” and “Outpatient Emergency,” (“Outpatient Emergency” is a new show kind of like “E.R.” except that the drama has to be resolved more quickly since the patients will be going home as soon as the anesthesia wears off), I’ve been surrounded by coverage of the writers’ strike.

The lead story on any local newscast is the writer’s strike and there also seems to be a tie-in to the strike during weather and sports casts as well.

“Another beautiful day today for the L.A. area …that is unless you’re a screen writer…details after the break” is common fare at 5, 6 and 10. All this coverage has added the writers’ strike to my list of worries putting it somewhere between Al Qaeda and what ever happened to the soft drink TAB. I do see a bigger opportunity and a looming danger with this strike, and that is more space for reality shows.

Just pretend for the sake of discussion that reality shows are just that real, which means there are no writers or scripts just cameras following folks living their lives. While believing that is a big suspension of reality, let’s try.

The first show I’m putting into production is a reality show following the striking screen writers for two reasons; firstly the drama surrounding their predicament is television gold and secondly you know they will riddle what they say with witty one-liners they can’t save until they go back to work. In true form to the “reality” genre I’m sure the writers will cuss like a sailor with Tourette’s Syndrome, which will provide more jobs for a fairly new but rapidly expanding profession – the bleeper. And therein lies the greater danger.

There isn’t much work for bleepers in a world dominated by scripted shows. No, it takes the trashy folks who populate the reality entertainment world to provide work for the bleeper. The screenwriters know cursing doesn’t play on scripted sit-coms and dramas, so they don’t write it. Not so for reality television where the f-bomb is king.

The bleeper is the defense mechanism between the potty-mouths on these shows and our delicate ears. I picture the bleeper as a steroid-enraged linebacker taking out curse words as fast as they come at him. They can come staccato or under-the-breath or off-set, it doesn’t matter, the bleeper is there to take them out. Reality television is the creator for this job and the screenwriter’s strike is the fertilizer that will grow the numbers and power of America’s bleeper’s. In that way, the writers may be the creators of their own undoing.

The bleepers may become so powerful during this strike that they require all shows to have cursing in them to build in work for their trade. This may start slowly with newscasts bleeping audio during news clips, but soon the bleeper lobby may require the actual newscasters themselves curse. Maybe Brian Williams will be introducing a story during NBC’s Nightly News and will be required to set up the piece by saying “today some more shi* news from Iraq” or after they taken control of all other shows they’ll move to children’s shows and have poor Barney the purple dinosaur saying things like “let’s take a trip to the farm and see some stinky f-ing farm animals kids!”

The bleepers could take control of all forms of media and require them to be chock full of cursing so they could bleep it out. This curse word racketeering could be the end of television, as you know it.

I sure hope the writers get what they want so they can get back to the business of writing curse-free dialogue for wisecracking teenage sit com characters and frazzled, overworked and in love doctor characters before the bleeper mafia takes over. Lucky for all of us, other than my script audition for “Outpatient Emergency,” I’ve got a little time on my hands here in southern California and I’m going to make fu@%!^* sure the strike ends and the writers get back to work.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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